Brother Nut with his vacuum on a smoggy Beijing street (photo: Brother Nut)
In 2015 a Chinese performance artist known as Nut Brother, or Brother Nut, spent 100 days pushing an industrial vacuum cleaner through Beijing to suck dust out of the city’s air. At the end he mixed the roughly 100 grams of grime he had collected with clay and fired it into a brick. The project, which he called Project Dust, turned something everyone in Beijing breathed but nobody could hold into a solid object you could pick up and weigh.
The brick did nothing to clean the air, and it was never meant to. It was a way of making pollution visible. Here is how the project worked, why it struck a nerve and what has happened to Beijing’s air since.
Who is Nut Brother?
Nut Brother (坚果兄弟, Jianguo Xiongdi in Mandarin) is a Beijing-based artist born in 1981 in Shenzhen, which made him about 34 during the project. He works under the pseudonym and declined to give his real name to CNN when it covered the brick.
His work since then has kept the same approach: take an environmental or social problem that is easy to ignore and give it a physical form. In 2018 he displayed 9,000 bottles of polluted water from a village in Shaanxi province as a mock market in Beijing’s 798 Art District. Authorities shut the show down, and an investigation into the village’s water followed. He also spoke at the Creative Time Summit in Washington, D.C., in 2016.
Vacuuming after dark under the city’s lights (photo: Brother Nut)
In front of the CCTV headquarters tower, one of Beijing’s best-known landmarks (photo: Brother Nut)
The vacuum and its sign drew curious passers-by at a street market (photo: Brother Nut)
How the 100-day project worked
Nut Brother bought a battery-powered industrial vacuum and began walking the city with it in July 2015. Wearing a respirator mask much of the time, he held the suction nozzle up into the air and let the machine run, reportedly for around four hours a day. He did not stay in one place. Over the following months he vacuumed near Tiananmen Square, the National Centre for the Performing Arts, the CCTV tower and the Bird’s Nest national stadium, as well as in ordinary hutongs, the narrow old lanes of central Beijing.
Each day he posted a short record on his Weibo social media account with the date, the weather and the area he had covered, plus a photograph taken by someone nearby. The daily log became part of the work: a public diary of breathing in a polluted city.
A grid of the daily photographs he posted throughout the project (photo: Brother Nut)
At the end of November 2015, after 100 days, he emptied the collected dust, mixed it with red clay and took it to a brick factory in Tangshan, in neighbouring Hebei province. The result looked much like any other brick. CNN reported that the vacuum had gathered a little over 100 grams of pollutants, mostly very fine particles. When someone offered to buy the brick for about 1,600 US dollars, he refused, saying the point was awareness, not profit.
Pressing the dust-and-clay mixture into a mould (photo: Brother Nut)
The finished pollution brick at the brick works (photo: Brother Nut)
Why a brick?
A brick is the basic unit of the building boom that changed Chinese cities in a few decades. Nut Brother described the dust he collected as a side effect of that development, mixing smog with dust from construction sites. Turning it back into a building material closed the loop in a way that was easy to understand without any statistics.
He also wanted the work to stay modest. He said he hoped to give the brick to a building site so it could end up inside a new Beijing building, comparing that act to “putting a drop of water in the ocean.” His larger point was about rights rather than technology. As he told CNN, “It is our right to breathe in fresh air.”
The idea grew out of Beijing’s “airpocalypse” of January 2013, when readings at the US Embassy passed 755 on its air quality index and outrage spread across Chinese social media. Art projects like this one, or the giant plastic-waste whale sculpture made to highlight ocean pollution, work because they let people see and touch a problem that is normally invisible or far away.
How bad was Beijing’s air in 2015?
The brick was finished during one of the worst stretches of the year. In late November and early December 2015, readings of PM2.5 published by the US Embassy went beyond 500, the top of the scale, which it labels “beyond index”. PM2.5 refers to particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres, fine enough to travel deep into the lungs and into the bloodstream. On 7 December 2015 Beijing issued its first ever red alert for smog, closing schools, halting outdoor construction and restricting car use.
For comparison, the World Health Organization’s guideline at the time set a 24-hour PM2.5 limit of 25 micrograms per cubic metre, and its 2021 update lowered that to 15. Readings in the hundreds therefore meant air many times dirtier than the health guideline, sometimes by a factor of 20 or more. Early reports that the air was “40 times” the safe level are plausible for the worst hours, though exact multiples depend on which measurement and guideline are used.
In 2013 the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the WHO, classified outdoor air pollution and particulate matter as causes of cancer in humans. WHO estimates that ambient air pollution caused about 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019, mostly through heart disease, stroke, lung disease and lung cancer.
Vacuuming in heavy smog, and the brick that resulted (photo: Brother Nut)
What a dust brick can and cannot measure
It is worth being clear about what the brick proves. A hundred grams of dust from a single vacuum is not a scientific sample of what any one person breathes. The machine pulled in coarse street dust as well as fine particles, and the amount depended on where and when it ran. The brick is an argument, not a measurement.
That is also its strength. Numbers such as micrograms per cubic metre are hard to feel. A brick sitting on a table is not. Nut Brother himself admitted the project had no practical use on its own, calling it a spiritual gesture meant to make more people think about the problem.
What changed afterwards
China had already launched a national Air Pollution Action Plan in September 2013, with Beijing told to cut fine particle levels by a quarter by 2017, mostly by reducing coal use and closing polluting factories. The air has improved noticeably since. Beijing’s average PM2.5 in 2016 was 73 micrograms per cubic metre, about 10% better than in 2015, and later years recorded new monthly lows, such as 23 in August 2019. Smog episodes still happen, but the extreme readings of the mid-2010s are now far less common.
No one would credit a single brick for that. Still, public pressure from residents, journalists, scientists and artists helped make air quality one of the most visible issues in Chinese cities during those years, and Project Dust became one of its most memorable images.
If you live somewhere with poor air, practical steps include checking a local air quality index, limiting hard outdoor exercise on bad days and using a well-fitted mask or air purifier where appropriate. People with asthma, heart or lung conditions should ask a doctor for advice tailored to them.
Sources: CNN (December 2015); Malay Mail / AFP (December 2015); Wikipedia: Brother Nut; Wikipedia: Air pollution in China; WHO: Ambient air quality and health. Photos by Brother Nut; story first reported in English by True Activist and Quartz.
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